The drive is almost three hours. It starts off pretty pleasant, lots of good music and worthwhile conversation. That all winds down as we draw closer to the no-name town my father has been haunting for the last thirty years. I text May, my half-sister, en route. Fill her in on the situation. That does little for my mood. By the time we cross into the town itself we’re entirely silent. ‘Welcome to Ferenbrooke’ says the sign, nondescript white letters on a generic green background. All evidence thus far suggests an entirely average town with rather special aspirations.
My birth-father’s house sits towards the outskirts of town, in a sparsely populated road just by the motorway. The properties here look to have been built post-war, quickly, and cheaply. Probably council housing or some other social housing scheme, at least initially. Every house on the street is of roughly the same construction, semi-detached two-beds in red brick with very little outside space.
Martin smoothly guides his Volkswagen, dodges a motley collection of rusted and uncared-for cars along the decayed road, more filled holes than original tarmac, passes the world’s least inspiring bus stop and its raincoat-clad occupant, who reminds me of the man who drew on our window. I eye him as we drive past, waiting for him to raise his head and see our car, but he remains still. I mentally chide myself for my paranoia and examine the house numbers.
‘We’re looking for 43,’ I say.
‘Yeah, I remember. That’ll be it, just before the corner.’
That’s the destination alright, another bland house with a messy lawn and filthy windows. An elderly man stands by the door, watching us approach. He’s short, skinny, has a bulbous nose and bright eyes reminiscent of my own. My heart skips a beat. Of course, it’s not my father. He’s dead. But it could definitely be his brother, the man on the phone. I had called him back after speaking to Martin, arranged this visit. During that call, Donald told me that my father died from a drug overdose. Seems fitting, banal even.
Martin turns his head and fixes me with those big brown eyes, lets out a long slow breath.
‘You ready?’ he asks.
I nod. The nod is a lie and Martin’s expression tells me that he clearly knows it is, but he accepts it anyway and opens his door. The old man approaches Martin with a hand extended, they shake hands and exchange forced smiles while I drag myself from the passenger seat and slowly amble around the car to the fractured footpath. Christ, this part of town is a shit-hole. Probably why my father felt so at home here.
‘Donald Wood,’ the old man says, ‘Owen Wood’s older brother. You must be Martin?’
‘That’s what they tell me,’ Martin replies, wearing half a smile.
I approach tentatively. In theory, this is going quite well. Donald appears to have no issue whatsoever with my partner being a Black man, he’s polite, seems to want nothing from me that I’m not willing to offer freely. So why does this feel so wrong? There’s a sense of distance, of my core self withdrawing. The world feels ephemeral, transient. The cracked paving beneath my feet shifts with my steps, rocking back and forth just enough to conjure the thought that perhaps there’s nothing beneath at all, that the ground we walk upon extends only inches down, that the material reality in which we live and breathe and fuck and die is merely a facade. Perhaps I am too.
Donald turns to me and smiles. He holds out a wrinkled little paw. I grasp it, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I shake it.
My birth-father’s brother claps me on the upper arm with his free hand, still gripping my right with his. ‘Owen,’ he says, eyes moist, chin quivering, ‘I’ve hoped to meet you for so very long. You look just like him, you know. In the face, I mean. The way you hold yourself, the way you walk, that’s very different.’
If I were more present I might visibly recoil at the idea I bear so much resemblance to my mother’s abuser. As things are, I nod and smile in my best estimation of a polite manner.
‘Nice to meet you.’ I mumble. Our hands separate. I wasn’t sure they ever would. My sense of self starts to reassert. The world returns to solidity by degrees.
‘So, shall we take a look inside?’
Martin steps forward, glances at me with a soft look in his eyes. ‘Ah, I don’t want to come off as rude, Donald, but I think this would be easier on Owen if it were just the two of us today.’
Donald’s eyebrows attempt lift-off. ‘Oh, right, yes. I understand.’ He smiles at Martin and then at me. He reaches into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and pulls out a slightly rusted ring holding several keys. ‘It’s the big one for the front door,’ he says. He pats me on the arm again, drops the keys into my hand, and nods cordially to Martin before walking north towards a bus stop at the end of the road, head bowed.
Martin softly punches my shoulder. I sigh, nod, and turn to face Donald.
‘Hey, Donald, I’ll call you later. We should all grab lunch or somethin’ before Martin and I head back to Cambridgeshire.’
The old man half jumps at the sound of his name. He looks back over his shoulder, offers a quivering smile and says, ‘That sounds lovely.’
With that said he progresses farther up the road and Martin and I turn to face each other.
‘You ready?’ he asks.
‘Let’s do it,’ I say. I open my hand and examine the keys I received from Donald. Four of them, one of the old style brass Mortice type, three of the flat sort. A deep breath, a moment to clear my mind, and we’re walking up the path to the front door. It’s the white plastic kind you often see on social housing; cheap and easy to maintain. Nonetheless this one has acquired a fair bit of wear and tear. Discolouration particularly. Christ, how do you even produce that shade of piss yellow? Piss, obviously, but how and why? Could it be intentional? Some fucking bizarre fashion statement, or merely a reflection of the owner’s character?
‘We gonna stare at that door all day?’
I glance at Martin. ‘Sorry,’ I say. I select the largest of the three flat keys and slot it into the lock on the front door. It opens easily enough. In I go. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I shiver.
The hallway stinks. Old smoke and older dust. Stairs leading up, presumably to bedrooms. We can check those out last. To my left is a doorway, half open. I peek in while Martin enters the house behind me and shuts the door.
A threadbare sofa sits right in the centre. There’s an old TV with a cracked screen in the far corner, by the window. The curtains are moldy. There’s a coffee table, of sorts, with the faint remains of various herbs and powders ground into the crevices. Behind the sofa, a bookshelf. I walk over and examine the selection. Mostly non-fiction, some thrillers, a little horror. I select a book at random and pull it out to look at the cover. Splinter and Other Stories by Alex Wolfgang. It looks creepy. There’s a bookmark in there. I open it to the marked page and read a few paragraphs from a short story called Mandibles then return the book to the shelf, bile rising in my throat. Disgusting.
One of the shelves is filled with science publications, focusing on biology. The book The Epigenetics Revolution is heavily marked, well handled. I don’t bother thumbing through; that stuff’s too dry for me.
I feel Martin’s hand on my back. ‘I guess we should see the other rooms,’ I say.
‘Huh?’ Martin responds from far away.
I turn around. He’s not there. Nobody is. I poke my head back into the hallway and see him further down, examining the fridge in a pokey little galley kitchen.
‘You call me?’ he asks.
‘Sorry, I thought you were in there with me.’
‘Did you want me to be? I’m sorry, I thought I’d scout ahead and make sure there was nothing too traumatic in here. Luckily someone cleaned out the fridge. Either that, or the fucker didn’t eat.’
I look into the pristine chamber, a tiny white box furnished for dead things waiting to be consumed, chill, lifeless. It’s far and away the cleanest part of the house I’ve seen. I cast my eye around the rest of the kitchen, examine every detail like a detective in some shitty American drama. The oven is filthy, crusted with the particular form of detritus common to appliances left fallow. A microwave on the work surface by the sink seems to have seen more use. The sink itself is stainless steel and spotless. A washing machine and dryer sit side by side, occupying the space under the work surface.
At the farthest end of the galley kitchen from the front of the house, a doorway opens into a tight little bathroom. It’s in good repair, the shower-over-bath arrangement appears to be a recent addition. I suspect that my birth-father took some pride in his appearance. I imagine him in there, water cascading down that face, utterly unknown to me yet so familiar to anyone who has seen my own. Did he ever think of me? As hot water poured over him, rinsing the taint of his perversions from his degraded, amphetamine fuelled body, the eager hiss of the shower head emptying his head of daily trivialities, did his mind ever wander to that half-formed family he left behind in Cambridgeshire? Did the son who bears his name, his blood, a facsimile of his features, ever intrude upon the ill-gotten tranquility in his head and his home?
I doubt it.
It occurs to me that I’ve been staring at the shower for quite some time. I turn and see Martin staring at me, head slightly inclined, a patient smile on his lips and concern in his eyes. I wrap my arms around him and bury my face in his neck, moisten his collar with tears I’m surprised to see. He rubs my back and rocks me from side to side, slowly, gently.
‘Let’s check out the bedrooms, finish getting the lay of the land, then head to the hotel. We can deal with things properly tomorrow,’ I say.
‘Sounds good,’ Martin says.
With his hand in mine I lead him to the stairs, half pull him up. He’s reticent. I look back and raise one eyebrow.
He wears a concerned expression, looks past me at the top of the stairs. ‘Something doesn’t feel right.’
‘You’re not wrong there, the whole house has it, right? That atmosphere, that chill.’
‘It’s like when we went down that iron-age mine, you remember?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. He’s so very right. The coldness, it has nothing to do with thermodynamics. It’s not an absence of heat, at least not just that. It’s an absence of the essential vitality that flows through every environment capable of supporting life. It’s like the void of space.
I take a deep breath. The air is foetid. ‘Let’s get this over with,’ I say.
At the top of the stairs, another bookcase. This one is loaded with CDs. Who has CDs these days? There’s R&B, drum & bass, jungle, garage, a little ’80s hair metal. Nothing good.
Two doors, both ajar. We nudge open the left door first. Double bed, wardrobe, chest of drawers. All cheap flat-pack stuff. Bed sheets and blankets look unwashed in the extreme. There’s a stench in here, old sweat and stale cigarette smoke.
On top of the chest of drawers there’s a lock box, one of the tin ones that market traders often use for petty cash. I pull the keys from my pocket. Nothing that would fit.
But I need to get into that box.
I lift the box and show it to Martin. ‘You see a key for this anywhere?’ I ask.
He shakes his head then walks past me and starts opening drawers, I check the wardrobe. Ratty clothes, mainly jeans and band tee-shirts. Christ, how old was this guy? His brother’s pushing seventy.
Fifty-five. He was fifty-five.
Why do I know that?
Mum told me when I was a kid and I don’t consciously remember. That must be it.
‘There could be a key somewhere in the other room,’ Martin says. He gestures at the box. ‘What do you think is in there?’
I glance at him then look down at the box, hold it up. It’s old, older than I am I think. ‘I don’t know. I want to know though, I feel like I need to know.’
Martin nods. He lays a hand on my shoulder and smiles, soft eyes fixed on mine.
His patience astounds me. His compassion is almost more than I can take. I don’t know how I’d cope without him here.
We move as one towards the final door. I raise a hand as if to knock. I don’t know why. I glance at Martin, he’s suppressing a laugh in a manner that falls some distance short of being convincing. I grunt and place my palm upon the old oak.
It’s freezing.
I furrow my brow and push the door open.
Immediately my eyes drift around the room, searching for the source of the preternatural chill. Nothing. It’s a small box room, three walls lined with shelves, each occupied by odd books and jars. A desk sits by the window, blackout curtains block any trace of sunlight. I flick the lightswitch and step in. Martin follows and approaches a shelf, focuses on a jar, picks it up, examines the contents.
‘This looks like mud or something,’ he says, ‘there’s a handwritten label, in funny squiggly letters.’
I join him. ‘Is that Hebrew, or Arabic, something like that?’
Martin shakes his head. ‘Kinda looks a bit like Thai, but fucked up.’
Every other container I check is labelled in a similar oblique fashion. I take a book from the top shelf. It’s a journal, a spiral drawn on the front, text handwritten in the same script as the jar labels. I flick through. Some diagrams are recognisable as humanoid forms and sections thereof, overlain with geometric patterns and labelled with notes, formulae, strange little symbols. I keep the journal in my hand as I examine a shelf of less opaque texts. Largely textbooks, by the look of it. A lot of biology and genetics and things like that. It seems my birth father was less of an air head than I’d thought.
I close the strange book and raise it in the air. ‘I’m gonna take this too, I think.’